Lion King, Solar, Em's Glasses

Apparently a couple of my posts I made did not post. I will work on trying to get those up. In the mean time, you throw us a little sunshine, and a lot has been going on around here. But before that, we had the annual Redding School of the Arts Junior High play. It is so well done that they have productions for two weekends in a row and much of the community makes an afternoon or a night of it. This year, it was Lion King, and two of the girls in my small group were involved.

Buddies getting ready to watch the show...Rafiki is their older sister.

Sophie did a fantastic job playing Rafiki and losing her voice for about two months straight.

Erin did a fantastic job as a lioness. They both have beautiful voices and earned solos with their parts.

All of the music was done using an orfestra. Yes, that word is correct. It is the type of instrument. Keep in mind this play is put on by 5th thru 8th graders. When you watch it, it's hard to believe these are kids!

After the show was over, we got to meet the cast.

Meanwhile, on the ranch, we are starting to get some green grass. And this means lots of work for us.

"She thinks my tractor's sexy." I just had to.

We are also in the process of getting solar panels put on the roof. PGE finally priced us out and we are biting the bullet with solar. But in order to put solar up, we had to first strip the cement tiles off the roof and put an underlay down.

To reduce the weight on the roof, we replaced the area that will be covered in solar panels with shingles.

Man I love this time of year! Beautiful sunsets every night.

But I digress...we then placed the tiles back over the rest of the roof. That area should be completely covered and will hopefully look fine.

We also hooked up my parent's hot tub...the girls are slightly pleased with that.

In fact, they have taken to doing the "polar plunge" and then running into the hot tub. I had the junior high girls do it on Friday night so of course my girls had to replicate.

Emily finally got her brand new glasses.  Look the same? Well, yes, except no more bifocals. Yippee! As it turns out, she was not using them because they were causing her eyes to drift out when she looked through them.

We discovered in her appointment that Emily has a scotoma - a loss of vision creating a blind spot - near the center of her vision, though off to the right a little bit. All of these things that I thought were pointing to a memory problem or learning disability may not be so. Let me back up. She has been having issues with 'spotty memory' - one minute she knows it and the next she does not, as well as reversing letters and numbers.

Well, as it turns out, she may just not even be seeing the letters/numbers I am asking her to recite or use. When she turns her head or the paper moves, she then has the opportunity to see it, but at that point, her mind puts the letters/numbers in reverse order because that is the order she saw them in. For example, if I ask her to read the word 'to' and she only sees the 'o', she says, o. Then as she turns her head to look at the next word, she catches the 't' out of the corner of her blind spot and says, "ot". It is kind of hard to explain on paper but basically she has been completely missing letters and reading words (and numbers) in reverse. So, rather than dyslexia or something similar, we hope to blame all that on her rather large blind spot right in the middle of her visual field. I can only imagine with her acuity and now you add a blind spot, ugh! And she is already reading at a first grade level. Smarty pants! It only seems to mess with her ability to read two letter words and two digit numbers, (longer words are fine as she can piece them together more easily), which is frustrating but at least she doesn't seem to struggle with every word.

So, all that to say: we got rid of the bifocals, dialed in her prescription (which has gotten a little worse), and will attempt to teach her to look around her blind spot.  She will need to slow down and be patient but if she scans ahead far enough, she might see all the letters. There is still hope we can shrink the spot but elimination is not likely.

I'm always amazed how much the glasses shrink her eyes.

Enough about Em, K on the other hand, is doing fantastic. She is thriving in school but decided this week that she wants to come home and do home school with us next year. So, I will have both girls again and will have to bow out of teaching the science, but be happy to have her back. She does like school, it's not a bad experience for her but she complains that it is "too long" and she "has to wait all the time for the naughty kids to be quiet" and she "misses playing with Emily". She told Dad tonight, "Maybe I will go back after a year, when they have calmed down a little more." She is so grown up but I will be happy to have her once again, for maybe one last year. :-)  The picture is a Toothless outfit she made from construction paper.

Well, have a wonderful day! God Bless!